Sen. Bernie Sanders’ plan to rescue the news industry is a dangerous, schizophrenic mess.
The Vermont senator extols the virtues of what he calls “real” and “truly independent” journalism, lauding fearless and uncompromising reporting that works hard to expose government and corporate malfeasance. But his praise is merely a prelude to proposing what Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie rightly characterizes as an “unprecedented power grab over freedom of speech and the press.”
Indeed, the 2020 Democratic candidate’s proposal, which he unveiled this week in an opinion article published by the Columbia Journalism Review, the self-described “voice of journalism,” is little more than an exercise in trying to have it both ways. He wants “real” and “truly independent” journalism and he wants an increased federal presence in the news industry.
The senator’s plan lays out a few concrete actions that he would take as president. His administration, for example, would bar any media merger from going forward if federal bureaucrats determine it would lead to layoffs, “adversely affect people of color and women,” or further concentrate ownership to just a small group of individuals.
In other words, Sanders’ plan to save newsrooms from being beholden to corporate interests is to prevent them from saving themselves. It is not that unusual to see struggling media organizations come together under the same roof — either to merge or to be acquired by larger organizations — in order to reduce overall expenses. To block such business transactions, or to tie them up for months or years in artificial quotas determined by federal bureaucrats, would be to hasten the disappearance of many smaller news organizations.
Meanwhile, Sanders’ plan also attacks the free press outright, arguing that most major newsrooms cannot be trusted today because they are compromised by corporate ownership. Somehow, he does not see this as being inconsistent with condemning President Trump for accusing the press of being untrustworthy.
“[W]e do not have enough real journalism in America right now,” the senator writes, “because many outlets are being gutted by the same forces of greed that are pillaging our economy.” He adds that journalism “success stories,” including the Miami Herald’s exposé on Jeffrey Epstein and the Charleston Gazette-Mail’s opioid reporting, are “too often the exception and not the norm.”
Why? Because corporations.
After all, TV networks that rely on $4.5 billion a year of pharmaceutical ads may be thrilled to sugarcoat our current dysfunctional health care system—but they will never provide a consistently fair hearing for something like Medicare for All, even though polls show that a majority of Americans support such a proposal.
Corporate media organizations sponsored by fossil fuel industry ads may gladly provide a platform for guests who insist that our current oligarchic economy is just great, but as studies show, the same outlets often downplay or omit coverage of the climate crisis that those advertisers are helping create.
And news outlets owned by Disney and Jeff Bezos may happily tout Disney films and Bezos’s plans for space exploration, but we cannot count on them to consistently and aggressively cover workers’ fight for better wages at Disney- or Bezos-controlled companies. In fact, in one instance, we saw that The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, tried to punish a reporter because he spoke out for better wages at the newspaper.
Translation: Do not believe the lying fake news. That sounds familiar.
Absurdly enough, after all of that ado about corporations owning newsrooms, the senator’s proposal also includes the following aside about Trump’s very similar attacks on the press:
Trump’s authoritarian bullying of the media is totally unacceptable and it must be denounced and rejected. But let us be clear: that alone will not solve the journalism crisis. Moreover, a further expansion of oligarchic business models in the media industry could make matters worse.
It almost as if the senator is saying: It is bad when Trump attacks the lying corporate media, but it is good when I do it. Got that?
And note that Sanders goes much further than Trump usually does. The senator claims the Washington Post is not only incapable of reporting fairly or independently because of owners like Bezos, but that it also “sugarcoats” news and misleads readers about issues that could hurt its corporate family.
If there is any major difference between these two attacks, I sure as hell cannot see it. Maybe the answer is not to condemn all attacks on journalists, but to accept that all politicians do this and ask the media to grow a thicker skin about it.
At any rate, I would encourage you to read Gillespie’s take on Sanders’ media plan. It reminds us that we have access now to more information than at any other point in human history and that the press is more of a victim of the market’s “creative destruction” than anything else.
There is a lot more going on in this industry than can be explained away with the normal “millionaires and billionaires” drivel on which Sanders relies for all of his economic “analysis.”
